Monthly Archives: May 2016

COLUMBIA, Mo. — Today 78 percent of Missouri’s electricity comes from coal. Replace coal and other fossil fuels with clean, renewable energy, and Missouri could be powered by wind, solar farms and solar panels mounted on top of homes and businesses. A small percentage of power could include using Missouri’s existing dams. And all this…

Thirty years ago, an explosion ripped through a Soviet nuclear power plant, killing 31 workers and releasing a plume of radioactive fallout that drifted over vast swaths of the continent. Five years ago, a wall of water slammed into a Japanese nuclear power plant, triggering equipment failures and three nuclear meltdowns. As the world reflects on…

When the hellbender conservation effort began in the early 2000s, there were less than 500 of the animals left in the wild. Survival projections for the species looked grim when MDC, the St. Louis Zoo, and other collaborators set out to do something that had never been done in the world before: breed the hellbender in captivity.

COLUMBIA — The Columbia Public School district plans to conduct lead testing of the drinking water in all the district’s buildings over the summer. The school district, which enrolls more than 17,000 K-12 students and 680 preschoolers, is taking action following the discovery of lead-tainted drinking water in Flint, Michigan. “This (testing) is to create a consistent baseline for all our…

The disease first appeared in Brent Sandidge’s farm in 1992, back when it was still called “mystery swine disease.” Sandidge wasn’t fully aware yet of how this disease would plague him over the next two decades, how he would watch countless pigs succumb, becoming feverish, refusing food and failing to reproduce. He vaccinated his…

COLUMBIA – About one in eight women will develop some kind of invasive breast cancer in her lifetime, according to the American Cancer Society. Finding those cancers isn’t always easy, especially with the current technology used to screen for them. Conventional mammograms have been plagued for years by concerns of false positives. In regular digital scans, images of…

By Lauren Puckett An epic battle has been growing for decades: Human versus mosquito. Humans attack with poisons, insecticides, vaccinations and medications, but more than one million people worldwide still die from mosquito-borne illnesses every year. Today, we have the technology to fight these diseases, and it’s called genetic modification. Gene technologies, developed by mosquito…